India’s Age of ‘Non-Reason’: How Urdu Poetry Spoke About Hate and ‘Stupidity'

Stupidity masquerading as power is by no means a new phenomenon.

Stupid people can be more dangerous than evil ones. So argued Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who lived through the worst excesses of Nazi Germany and was deeply troubled to see ordinary Germans turn against the Jews who had lived in their midst for centuries, throwing stones at their homes and businesses, harassing and humiliating them and eventually becoming silent and unprotesting witnesses to the escalating hate pogroms against them. A founding member of the Confessing Church that resisted the Nazi government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church, Bonhoeffer's vocal opposition to fascism eventually cost him his life; he was arrested in 1943 and executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945.